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How-To Geek

When nearing the end of a great book it’s natural to want more books like the one that is about to come to an end. YourNextRead takes the book you’re reading and suggests follow up books to match it.

For each book you plug in you get eight suggestions. You can click on one of the suggestions to read more or, if you’re already familiar with the book, give it a thumbs up or thumbs down to refine the search. We plugged in Nurture Shock, a book we just finished reading–it’s a fantastic book that reads like a Freakonomics-style look into childhood–and were rewarded with some solid matches right off the bat like Mind in the Making and Outliers. All solid recommendations that fit the culture through the lens of statistical analysis and/or child-rearing theme found in Nurture Shock.

Hit up the link below to take YourNextRead for a spin or visit MakeUseOf for additional book finding resources.

Jason Fitzpatrick is warranty-voiding DIYer and all around geek. When he's not documenting mods and hacks he's doing his best to make sure a generation of college students graduate knowing they should put their pants on one leg at a time and go on to greatness, just like Bruce Dickinson. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.

There’s been a fair bit written on getting caught in your own filter bubble. When I was at Uni and one used booked citation indexes, part of the joy – and importance of book based searches – was that I could go as deep as I wanted to but always left say apx 15% of searches for physically “nearby” citations that were NOT directly related. In other words outside the filter parameters. On many occasions interesting topics and ideas availed themselves and there would not of been any other method of coming accross this info. The synthetic nature of knowledge generation is too readily lost these days.

GEEK TRIVIA

DID YOU KNOW?

In 1974 sociologist Phillip Kunz conducted an experiment on reciprocity wherein he sent 600 handwritten Christmas cards to random people; he received over 200 replies of handwritten cards and letters in return.